John Prendergast: Bush mistook me for Bono

[emad]

SNIP:
"With a glint in his eye, Prendergast says Bush did, in fact, quiz him intently for advice. "I was at some bill-signing ceremony and he saw me across the room and came over," he marvels. "Then his aide told me that he thought I was Bono." The room of boffins explodes into laughter."
ENDSNIP

From:
John Prendergast: Bush mistook me for Bono

Like his doppelgänger, John Prendergast is a man on a mission - to save 2 million lives in Darfur. Jane Bussmann pushes past Angelina Jolie and Bill Clinton to catch up with the radical peacekeeper
11 April 2005


Chad, January: News cameras film Darfur's refugee children for ABC's prestigious Nightline show in the United States. It's unusually good publicity for an old story. The refugees were bombed out of their villages, but a legal stalemate means the UN can't name the perpetrators. But the media-savvy youngsters have made a banner for viewers: blood-coloured paint rains on stick people as a fat man laughs; his caption, "Omer al-Bashir" - the President of Sudan. For two decades, Bashir's Arab government has sent Arab "Janjaweed" militia to purge the black villages of Darfur, stealing their land and livestock.

In 2003, black rebel groups took up arms. The government, instead of targeting the rebels, began exterminating their people - against the Geneva Convention, which prohibits attacks on civilians. The British Foreign Office admitted in November they did not want to intervene because "it would become bogged down and some new cause for all the jihadists in the world would emerge". Fall-out from the invasion of Iraq means the West hesitates to stop a genocide that has nothing to do with it, and so, unpunished, Bashir's storm troopers ethnically cleanse and mutilate villagers for days at a time.

The children have four people to thank for the airtime: Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle, hollow-eyed at vibrant genocide; real Hotel Rwanda manager Paul Rusesabagina; crusading congressman Ed Royce and John Prendergast. With his back-to-front baseball cap over less-than-military hair, Prendergast isn't your typical peacemaker: in the past, he's been kicked out of Sudan and declared an enemy of the state for demanding its government answers to war crimes - and still he refuses to be quiet. Prendergast's informality conceals serious business. The four men are inspecting the refugee camp, and Cheadle is interviewing Prendergast. He chooses his words carefully: "These people have been hit by tsunamis of violence." This phrase will inevitably attract criticism, but Prendergast is used to breaking the rules on what he sees as a race against time to save two million lives: today, Darfur's problem is violence, but if the refugees aren't back on their farms before the planting season, it's Ethiopia all over again.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=628203